Moon River: words

Honeymoon

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 08:03:43 GMT

According to Wikipedia (which in turn references the Oxford English Dictionary on the matter), the etymology of the word honeymoon is unclear. The American Heritage Dictionary (via answers.com) suggests it's "perhaps from a comparison of the moon, which wanes as soon as it is full, to the affections of a newly married couple, which are most tender right after marriage", which doesn't sound all that positive. Returning to the Wikipedia entry, honeymoon may have been used in Babylonian times to describe the bride and groom consuming honey (in the form of mead, a beverage) before the next moon. via kottke

The Scandinavian word for honeymoon is derived, in part, from an ancient Northern European custom in which newlyweds, for the first month of their married life, drank a daily cup of honeyed wine called mead. The ancient practices of kidnaping of bride and drinking the honeyed wine date back to the history of Atilla, king of the Asiatic Huns from A.D. 433 to A.D. 453.

So that leaves us with the question of where the "moon" in the word "honeymoon" originates. One piece of folklore relates that the origin of the word moon comes from a cynical inference. To the Northern Europeans the terms referred to the body's monthly cycle and, its combination with honey, suggested that not all moon's of married life were as sweet as the first. British prose writers and poets, in the 16th and 17th centuries, often made use of the Nordic interpretation of honeymoon as a waxing and waning of marital affection.

There are various explanantions for the origin of the tradition and also the name of honeymoon. The word honeymoon has its roots in Norse word "hjunottsmanathr" which was anything but blissful. The Northern European history describes it as the abduction of a bride from the neighboring village. It was imperative, that the abductor, who is husband to be, take his bride to be into hiding for period of time. His friends assured his and her safe keeping and kept their whereabouts unknown. Once the bride's family gave up their search, the bridegroom returns to his people. This folkloric explanation presumably is the origin of today's 'honeymoon', for its original meaning meant 'hiding'.

The Scandinavian word for honeymoon is derived, in part, from an ancient Northern European custom in which the newlyweds drank a daily cup of honeyed wine called 'mead' for the first month of their married life.

In Irish, the word honey is from "meala". The word for honeymoon is "mi na meala", meaning the "month of honey" and refers to how the bride and groom would spend that period of time. Irish monks first produced the fermented honey brew called mead for mead for medicinal purposes; then found it could make well people feel even better. Following the wedding a sufficient amount of mead was given to the bride and groom, along with special goblets, so they could share the unique brew for one full moon after the wedding--and thus the term honeymoon was coined. It was believed that this delicate yet potent drink was the best way to ensure a good beginning for a new marriage and it was also believe to endow powers of virility and fertility.

With so many explanations for the origin of the name and tradition of honeymoon, the most likely source is the medieval custom of couple consuming the mead for the first month of their marriage to ease them into married life and traditionally to increase their fertility. Honeymoons were a way to encourage conjugal bliss and the creation of children, a month of sanctioned sex.

Honeymoons are traditionally fraught with sexual innuendo coming from the time when most people didn't have sex until their wedding night. The wedding night and the following ones, became embued with a special sexual aura that everyone, including family and friends, would take advantage of. At one time, it was customary for all the female members of a bride's family to prepare her for bed on the wedding night and personally taking her to her new groom's bedroom, whispering instructions to the bride along the way. More recently, friends and well-wishers have been known to stand outside the bridal suite and make as much noise as possible. The idea being calling more attention to the fact that carnal relations are taking place in the bridal chamber.

Nowadays, when very few brides and grooms are virgins, wedding night and honeymoon has somewhat lost its appeal. Honeymoon is taken more as vacations. It is a kind of holiday from long lasting wedding planning, a chance for the newly wed couple to decompress after months of stress and tension of huge wedding. Some couples even put off their honeymoon until they have some money to spend. But they forget that two years after getting married, it won't be a honeymoon but just a holiday.

A honeymoon is not just getting away from people and not just a vacation. It helps in establishing the new marriage. Honeymoon is casting off of your old life and the beginning of the new one. A honeymoon literally means going away, symbolically and physically, from everybody one knows to a place where no one knows them and where the newly wed could stay together and know more about each other and establish long lasting bond.

Wedding brings two people together physically but honeymoon confirms it and sets the tone for how intimate and passionate the rest of years together will be.

The word first appears in the 16th century. The honey is a reference to the sweetness of a new marriage. And the moon is not a reference to the lunar-based month, but rather a bitter acknowledgement that this sweetness, like a full moon, would quickly fade. via http://www.datingmatchmakers.com/wedding/honeymoon.aspx

jouir

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:46:30 GMT

jouir de la foule est un art

Charles Baudelaire Le spleen de Paris (via au fil de mes lectures)

Visualcy

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 17:40:06 GMT

"I have been playing with a word for several years to describe the phenomenon of grasping the world through images rather than text or sound, and had been playing with visuate or visualcy. " read more

Alphabets are as simple as...

Sun, 21 May 2006 17:49:05 GMT

Writing systems may look very different, but they all use the same basic building blocks of familiar natural shapes, reports Roger Highfield

If there is one quality that marks out the scientific mind, it is an unquenchable curiosity. Even when it comes to things that are everyday and so familiar they seem beyond question, scientists see puzzles and mysteries.

Familar form: letters have been shaped by everyday sights such a the crescent moon

Look at the letters in the words of this sentence, for example. Why are they shaped the way that they are?

To find out, scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other “abugidas”, which use characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up words.

via mindfullife

Fun with Words

Tue, 16 May 2006 16:53:04 GMT

Wordly Riches

English language hits 1 billion words: "A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as 'podcast' and 'celebutante' to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday." (Fresno Bee) via

well no wonder, with all the fun new words (here some i found amusing)

bibliobibuli

those who read too much.
bolus

a large medicinal pill; also, a mass of chewed food.

boondoggle

an unnecessary activity or wasteful expenditure.

bosky

having an abundance of trees or shrubbery.

corybantic

frenzied or agitated.

doddle

something easy or requiring little effort.

twee

affectedly cute or quaint; overly precious or nice.

tantalolagnia

arousal caused by teasing.

pilpul

a nitpicking, unproductive argument.

gormless

dull, stupid, clumsy.

expiscate

to learn through laborious investigation.

eesome

pleasing to the eye.

evancalous

pleasant to embrace.

footle

to talk or act foolishly; to waste time.

Flâneur

Sun, 14 May 2006 20:54:27 GMT

"the vague feeling is the pleasure of walking aimlessly through the streets of New York; the seemingly causeless delight in strolling about with no destination and no hurry, just looking at things, letting myself wander, getting ideas. In the increasingly rare instances I find myself actually doing it I invariably think, “I wish I could just do this all the time, every day.” In truth, and I’ve never really known why, It just makes me happy. Wandering the streets, facelessly weaving through the throngs, feels so natural and comfortable that I’d never even wondered whether there was a word for it. . . I just discovered yesterday there is a word for this perfect activity: flanerie. Had I only known as a child I might have answered all the insistent adult inquiries of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” quite differently and said “I will be a Flâneur!” via The Nonist

Tad Lauritzen Wright Beautiful Landscape 2005 six-color lithograph

Libido/Boggle Metaphors

Tue, 09 May 2006 20:58:59 GMT

Sometimes, my emotional life feels like nothing so much as an over-long game of Jenga: I know the only way to make progress is to move stuff around, but one of these days a single shift is going to bring the whole goddamned pile down. Greg Knauss

The map and the book (etymology)

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 21:09:16 GMT

The word "map" is perhaps of Punic (Phoenician) origin, via Latin and Middle English, from the table cloths that maps were first drawn on. (The Phoenicians, great traders who sailed in the Mediterranean Sea 700BC, mainly sailed within sight of land but they also used celestial navigation)

Apparently the Phoenician language (or Punic, the derivative dialect spoken in Carthage, Phoenician language was very close to Hebrew ) doesn't give modern English many words, but another of them is bible, from Bublos, Byblos, the Phoenician city which exported papyrus to Greek cities, via: Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin biblia, from Greek, pl. of biblion, book.

Tabernacle world view from Cosmas Indicopleutes, 6th century (the map has no conection to the text, i just happen to like it :-) )

Also: Wikipedia on bible, map and Phoenician languages. Phoenician mapping and place-naming.

via

How many Phoenician words do you know?

once more, a map i love, and this is a good opportunity to post it again:

Ebstorf mappamundi, 1234 Gervase of Tilbury (reproduction)
(oriented with East at the top)

power of words

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:49:26 GMT

Political rhetoric is one of the most interesting to analyse, because of the emophasis on using metaphors to convey various meanings within a speech. This project tries to break down the rhetoric, take the words out of context, and treat them at face value in order to analyse the breakdown of content in these speeches.

Here is an example of a textual analysis visualization of keywords mentioned during famous speeches (that you can find in the site ranging from G.W.Bush to W. Churchill, you can observe the speechs breaking into words cloud). the visual display breaks down the rhetoric, takes the words out of context, & treats them at face value in order to analyze the breakdown of content. each group of metaphors is color-coded, & sized based on frequency. via mindgap

Pictures never taken

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:09:50 GMT

This is a picture I did not take of a rainsoaked woman with white hair in a white jogging suit with red stripes down the legs, walking toward me in a downpour, carefully pressing a white kleenex against her bloody nose.
via stilljournal

Back and Froth

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:03:42 GMT

Amusing exchanges.

Lanie: I want a kitten.
A.: Hmmm. What color?
Lanie: Fluffy.

A.: I’m going out now.
Lanie: Don’t do anything I haven’t done.

Lanie: What are you doing? We’ll be late for the train.
A.: I’m in the bathroom.
Lanie: You have to go to the bathroom now?
A.: It’s now or never.

via logodrome

ONE WORD

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 17:49:12 GMT

SITE
you'll see one word at the top of the following page.

you have sixty seconds to write about it.

as soon as you click 'go' the page will load with the cursor in place.

don't think. just write.

I stambled again, on that

ghost forest

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:13:41 GMT

ghost forest n. A stand of dead trees, particularly one surrounded by water from wordspy

Example Citation: All across southern Louisiana, there are groves of dead cypress trees, known as ghost forests, which have been killed off by encroaching salt water.
—Elizabeth Kolbert, "Watermark," The New Yorker, February 27, 2006

Child

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 18:25:39 GMT

"A child should be spoken to as though it were a god, fully cognizant of the wiles and vagaries of adult excuses and justifications.
When it is told it cannot do something, it should be informed as to why anyone is ever allowed to do that thing, if anyone ever is.
If it is suggested that a child cannot have a requisite capacity for judgment on the matter, then we must be prepared to explain how it is ever determined that a non-child can have such a capacity.
And we can never say that this happens magically at a certain age.
We are addressing a small god to whom the lameness of our excuses looms very large.
If the child is curious, then it will have the wherewithal to understand, if you have the courage to explain.
And then it will be out of your hands what the child does."
Fron The Philosophical Notebooks of Bianco Luno

"the young child, already / we turn him around and force him to look backwards / at the world of forms and not into the Open, which / in the animal's face is so profound"

Rilke

A Tale

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:17:37 GMT

More than air

more than water

more than lips

lighter lighter

Your body is the trace of your body

Poem: From "A Tale of Two Gardens," by Octavio Paz (Thanks Elise)

Photo: mine

Moon River

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 14:17:25 GMT

a small story

Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 17:27:53 GMT

This story proves, that by throwing pebbles to a lake, one can never predict the seconery consequences...

“The story so far: Danish paper publishes cartoons that mock Muslims. An Iranian paper responds with a Holocaust cartoons contest. Now, a group of Israelis announce their own anti-Semitic cartoons contest. Amitai Sandy, the publisher of Tel-Aviv, Israel-based Dimona Comix, and founder of the contest jokes, “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”” ( via Follow me here)

nostalgia

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 09:31:44 GMT

History and the Politics of Nostalgia

In 1688 the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer published a tract in which, after considering the terms nostomania and philopatridomania, he settles on a combination of the Greek words nostos and algos to describe the pain resulting from the desire to return to one’s home. Thus the word nostalgia was born.

Throughout eighteenth-century Europe the word would gradually be adopted by specialists and laypeople alike to describe a disease provoked by excessive attachment to a distant homeland, a condition at first thought to be common particularly among natives of mountainous regions. By the end of the eighteenth century, the notion was expanded to include pathological attachment to any faraway place and, later, to distant times and persons.

The fact that Hofer considered previously existing terms to be inadequate and felt the need to create an entirely new word, a word that, in turn, gained increasing currency in Europe, suggests that something new—a new way of feeling or a new way of thinking about an old feeling—was entering the world.

Indeterminite Numbers

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 12:14:49 GMT

eleventeen: not sure how large this number is, but I'm pretty sure it is between 11 and 21 inclusive. Nominally used to mean any absurd use of a specific number. e.g. "I had to enter a product activation code of 'A ampersand g g L P 7 eleventeen something..."
umpteen: This number is relatively small (usually under 30). It is used in conjunction with a specific task (or task iteration). e.g. "I told you for the umpteenth time - 'No swimming with the sharks!'"
thirty-twelve: I've never used this number, nor have I ever hear it be used. It may be regional. It refers to an indeterminute number between 30 and 59. e.g. "Age the pizza for thirty-twelve days in the frigde before throwing it out."
fourty: Probably the only legally specific non-real number. I've made out many a check for this amount. e.g. "Pay to the order of DishNetwork; Fourty dollars and 84/100."
oodle: This is interesting, as it functions like a single-name 'place-holder number' (dozen, hundred, thousand, million). You may have "oodles of puppies", but you cannot have "an oodle of puppies" or "half an oodle of puppies". So it may never exist in a singular, or fractional form. Unlike 'plethora', oodle does not have a connotation of excess. e.g. "I have oodles of trading cards, but you have a plethora."
zillion: Any incomprehensibly large number. For a five-year-old $100 is about equal to "a zillion dollars". For an average adult, this number is certainly greater than 100,000... but it depends on context. e.g. "That company charges zillions if you want them to consult.
bazillion: More than a zillion... possibly as small as 2 zillion.
(can also be spelled bizillion or bahzillion [rare].)
gazillion: Larger than 'bazillion' probably by at least 2 degrees of magnitude. e.g. Algeria's national debt is like umpteen gazillion dollars.
(can also be spelled gahzillion [rare].)
trazillion: Larger even than 'gazillion' (again) by about a factor of 100. This variant is very rare. [specifically, it is 3 degrees of magnitude more rare] e.g. Algeria's national debt is like umpteen gazillion dollars.
(can also be spelled trizillion [rare].)
quadzillion: This is getting silly. I will also include in this definition "quintzillion". While I'm at it - I'm going to make up "sexzillion" and "heptzillion"; neither of which exist as of C.E. 2002 but will probably crop up as the need for mind-bogglingly-seeming large indeterminite number increases.

via (many more word-games and funnies)

New words

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:26:58 GMT

Some i liked:

Alpha Geek:

The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the
alpha geek around here."

Body Nazis:

Hardcore exercise and weightlifting fanatics who look down on anyone who doesn't work out obsessively.

Seagull Manager:

A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits on everything and then leaves.

Cube Farm:

An office filled with cubicles.

Idea Hamsters:

People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

Chips and Salsa

Chips = hardware, salsa = software. "Well, first we gotta figure out if the problem's in your chips or your
salsa."